Alone in the Archives

While doing a bit of Internet searching today, I found this blog written by the archivist at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Geneva, NY). This blog is written by someone who is working on digitization projects and attending to normal archive tasks. It is truly a view from the trenches.

One of the things this person is working on is digitization scrapbooks. In August, the author, Linda Clark Benedict, wrote:

Tuesday I spent the day with the Colleges’ photographer...Once he was all set up he clicked and I turned pages. I am very excited about seeing these on the web. He would photograph a page, then if there was a folded item, e.g. program, news clip, I would open it and he would photgraph it again. The webpage will be set up so if you click on the item it will appear to open.

The scrapbooks we did were the William Smith 50th Anniversary scrapbook, and the Francis Belle Eddy scrapbook. Eddy was in the WSC charter class (1912) and seems to have documented her college life very well. It will be great fun to read in detail. And the scrapbooks, already in bad condition will not have much further handling. I think I will put them on display when they kick off the webpage, however.

Blogging is a great way of sharing information from the trenches. It would be wonderful if more people in the trenches of digitization projects did this. The lessons we all would learn would be invaluable.